I'm up working late tonight and came across something in my readings that I thought I would leave here. It's found in Chapter 2 - "Striving for Home: Community, Collaboration and Sustainability," in Ted Bernard's (2010)
Hope & Hard Times: Communities, Collaboration and Sustainability. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers. (
www.newsociety.com)
Striving for home implies finding a community such as Athens with a resilient social structure and lots of social capital woven into the complex networks occupied by smart and caring people. These communities have the marking of a deep economy with locally owned businesses, organic farmers, farmers' markets, locavores, craftspeople, cyclists, and purveyors of slow food. They strive for environmental and social justice. there are ample "third places" (niether work nor home) to gather and celebrate. Such communities retain some of their natural and historically significant landscapes and folks have a few notions about their bio-region and what happens beyond the bounds of their place. Just as they invest in social capital by nurturing soils, waters, forests, steep slopes, and biodiversity. And the "wage" peaceable campaigns to save this sacred thing called community. As Moore writes in the epigraph for this chapter, community evolves in this "struggle for community."
(Bernard, 32)